Is Coconut Oil Poison?

Chris Albert 00:00:00 (link to this point)

This is Chris Albert, and I'm here to remind you of one thing. Someday, you're going to die. Now that's not some morbid statement or scary idea. It's solid fact. Your time here on this earth is limited.

And we need to be reminded of this as much as possible for one simple reason, to live your best life while you can. This is the Warrior Soul Podcast.

And what is going on everybody? What is going on everybody? This is Chris Albert, and this is the Warrior Soul podcast where we deliver tools, tactics, ideas, talk about issues, and introduce you to people who can help you to live your best life. And the most important aspect of living your best life, in my opinion, my humble opinion, is in making sure you're taking care of your greatest assets. Those are your mind and your body.

Alright? That is the whole point of self improvement. If you're not taking care of those two things, your mind and your body, you can allow yourself go to waste. Alright? And we make up all these reasons as to why we can't.

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Couple of different notes before we get started. This podcast is brought to you by f bomb nutrition. F bomb makes delicious portable packets of fats. I'm very, very happy with this product, and I'm very happy with the people who run the company. They make awesome delicious macadamia nut butters.

And this one here is macadamia nut butter with coconut butter, but they've got them mixed up with chocolate, mixed up with sea salt, mixed up with coconut butter, and and they're absolutely delicious. They're also sending package of these to the troops overseas, and they're such great people. I love them to death. And, our listeners here on the Warrior Soul podcast, they get 20% off when they go to www.dropanfbomb.com and use the code Warrior Soul at checkout. Couple of other things.

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Anthony from the private Facebook group over on the Warrior Soul Fitness Academy, He had a question, man, and it was a really valid one. And his was, who the heck do I trust? Because people have been telling me that coconut oil is healthy. People have been telling me that coconut oil can help me out. And all of a sudden, we have this Harvard professor go over to Germany.

She gets on stage, and she says, coconut oil is pure poison. Alright? And this is following on something that the American Heart Association put out last year that said that coconut oil was never good for you. Okay. So we have two voices out there amidst what you would call the mainstream medical society saying that coconut oil and saturated fat in general is horrible for you.

But here's are a few different things that we know and we understand. Number one, the science centered around the fact that saturated fat is bad for you is very, very shoddy. Okay? Now two prominent journalists have discussed the whole history behind this, One of whom has come on to the Warrior Soul podcast as a guest before. Mister Gary Taubes, in in his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, he kinda detailed the history of Ancel Keys.

The other one is Nina Teicholz. And in her book, she kinda details the whole history as to how fat got villainized. And it's a pretty crazy history. It's a pretty crazy history. Now granted, whenever I talk about these guys over on YouTube or anywhere else, I get a bunch of crazy crazy tribalists coming on, and they're telling me, well, these guys are a bunch of journalists, and they're liars.

Right? But here's the thing, guys, and and I I I don't know if you guys have been paying attention to our medical statistics these days. I don't know if you guys have been paying attention to what has been happening out there as far as the everything going on with our health in this country, but we've got some ridiculous statistics out there. Now in the VA system alone, one in four veterans getting admitted to the VA system has full blown diabetes. Now that comes on the back of statistics suggesting that up to a third of Americans are prediabetic.

Okay? And that comes on to, you know, what we're seeing is a plague of diabetes and heart disease in this country. Now I've talked to a lot of different experts. I've talked to a lot of different people out there. I've talked to Dominic D'Agostino.

I've talked to Terry Wahls. I've talked to a lot of experts in the health and fitness industry. And, you know, we're kind of coming around that saturated fat and fat in general is not bad for you. But there's some caveats here, and I'm gonna get into those in a second. But I wanna get that notion in your head for a woman to get on stage and to say that coconut oil is pure poison.

That woman is not practicing science. And in fact, I would argue that medical the the medicine as we know it is not a science. It is an applied science. Okay? When they make these recommendations, a lot of times, they aren't making them based off of, you know, actual studies or anything like that.

And I'm gonna go through some of the science for you on this and talk about those studies. But they're not making them based off of academic studies. They're they're making them based off of fifty years of research that was largely funded by industries in this country who wanted fat to be villainized. And I feel very, very comfortable in saying that as a podcaster, as a journalist. And if you look at the historical record and you read those books, you will see it all right there.

And I very feel very comfortable in saying that coconut oil is absolutely not poison for a few different reasons. Now, number one, let me explain why I I can't stand when people say a food is good or bad or or or anything else. Now, when we think about coconut oil, for the past few years since coconut oil has had a better name out there, you know, there's a lot of people who are saying that it's like God's gift to nutrition. That it is something that can heal everything. That it is something that that everybody should be eating all the time.

And I don't think that's true either. I really don't. I don't think that we should be saying that anything is a quote unquote quote super food or anything is a quote unquote good or bad food. But to call coconut oil poison is to ignore a bunch of different things. The first thing is this.

This woman basically said that coconut oil has been a trend over the last few years. But let's think about this for a second. Indigenous tribes in the South Pacific had been eating coconut oil for thousands of years. They've been eating coconut for thousands of years. Alright?

So there's actually actually scientific studies that that have been done on two different populations of Polynesian tribes. Alright? The most prominent of which was the Tokelauans. Forgive me if I'm pronouncing that incorrectly. They consumed as much of 63 of their calories from coconuts, and they had extremely high intake of saturated fat.

That's as much of 63% of their total calories coming from saturated fat. Now they had extremely low incidences of coronary artery disease, of cardiovascular disease, of heart disease in general. Right? And the thing is, for somebody to get up there and say that this has been a trend that's just been going on for a couple of different years, that's complete BS. The fact of the matter is people have been eating these foods, people have been eating saturated fat for most of human history.

And the real trend, in my opinion, is that of what we have in our country today, where people are getting most of their calories from sugar, from grains, from from agriculture. And I'm not here to demonize grains, and I'm not here to demonize high carb diets, but I am to I'm saying this, is that fat has been overly demonized for the past fifty years. Now granted, this is what I'll say about the Polynesian studies. What these people were eating was coconut meat and coconuts in general. And when they got the oil from the coconut, they were there shredding the coconut themselves and extracting the oil themselves, and they were cold pressing it themselves.

Right? So there is a difference between getting something that's cold pressed that has been, you know, extracted from the coconut by shredding it down and and and getting it out without heating it up versus, you know, some of the really highly processed oils we get. Okay? So that's really, really important to understand there. When we think about whether or not we should be eating coconut oil, I highly recommend that you get a cold pressed version of it.

You know, that hasn't been heated up and something that hasn't been getting the oil extracted from it by by a high heat process. And that's because if you do expose these types of fats to high heat, they could oxidize and that could cause a buttload of inflammation. Okay? And inflammation is what we don't want. Now, as I also should mention that when we publish this episode up on iTunes, we're also gonna put out show notes, and you'll be able to download all of my notes for this along with the scientific studies that are going into what I'm saying because you should always check on this stuff to verify.

Alright? So the next thing you should understand about coconut oil is that it contains something called medium chain triglycerides. Now these are shorter chain fatty acids that quickly turn turn to ketones in the body. Alright. Now, something to understand about MCTs medium chain triglycerides is number one, they're actually very anti inflammatory.

Okay. They're very anti inflammatory. And number two, they've actually been demonstrated to result in a negative energy balance, and cause increased energy expenditure in the body. Now what does that mean? That means that when you consume MCTs, it actually helps your body to burn fat.

Okay? Actually helps you to burn your body to burn fat, and that's been shown both in a 2015 study and in a 1996 study that said that MCTs actually increased energy expenditure up to 20% over longer chain fatty acids. So again, that's another benefit of consuming coconut oil. Now coconut oil itself is about 60% MCTs, and the rest is what they call lauric acid, and that's why it's got this pea c like texture. And we'll get into why lauric acid has those types of benefits, but medium chain triglycerides are known to have a number of different benefits there.

The other thing about coconut oil is that it actually can kill pathogens in your digestive tract. Right? So, lauric acid, which I what I just talked about that that acid that gives coconut oil its kind of pasty solid look. When it inject when it gets ingested, it becomes monolaurin. And this is important because it's highly antimicrobial.

Okay? And what this allows it to do is it it helps to kill pathogens and kill bacteria in the digestive tract. And this is something that, a lot of people take for granted. Your digestion and all the different types of things that exist in there, the unfriendly bacteria that exist in there, they can actually cause a lot of inflammation, and inflammation in that in the digestive tract can travel throughout your body. It can result in everything from achy joints, all the way up to brain fog, all the way up to heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

Alright? So again, I'm not don't quote me on saying coconut oil will will cure cancer, but it will kill pathogens in your in your body that can help you to remain healthy. Okay? Another thing that you can understand about coconut oil is that it can actually raise your good high density lipoprotein cholesterol, your good HDL cholesterol. Now the saturated fat in coconut oil, it's known to raise good cholesterol.

Alright? Good cholesterol is the cholesterol that's easier to get through your bloodstream and actually helps to sweep out the bad cholesterol. Another really interesting thing about it is when it comes to low density lipoprotein, the bad cholesterol, And consuming the saturated fat in coconut oil has actually been shown to increase the particle size of LDL. Now why is that important? Well, one of the reasons why LDL is so dangerous is because it can't get sweep through those cells.

Alright? And that's why having LDL is is bad because it's such it's it's low density, it's packed in there, and it can really build up inside of your blood vessels. But increasing the particle size has been shown to make it more fluffy, and that's been shown to make low density lipoprotein or LDL cholesterol a lot more benign. Alright? So just to let you know, about the studies behind this, one study that consisted of 40 different women showed that Coke consuming coconut oil regularly would raise HDL and actually lower LDL and actually change the particle size of their LDL.

So it's been shown to make LDL more benign. Another thing to take into account here, consumption of coconut oil and medium chain triglycerides has been shown to lessen the effects of Alzheimer's and increase mental acuity. Now what does that mean? Well, one of the guests that I've had on the Warrior Soul podcast, doctor Dominic D'Agostino, he's one of the preeminent researchers out there right now on ketosis and cancer. Okay.

And one of the things that he's been looking into, and that's been been examined for quite a while is are the effects of the ketogenic diet on epileptics. For some reason, being in ketosis really helps epileptics to avoid having seizures. Now, they're doing even more research on this and looking into the effects of Alzheimer's and dementia and neurological deficiencies. And they've actually demonstrated that having better fats in the diet, higher amounts of fats in the diet has been shown to decrease the symptoms of Alzheimer's, to increase mental acuity, and decrease the likelihood that people would fall into these types of diseases. And again, the study on that is going to be up in the show notes for this episode when the show gets published.

But, you know, and here's the thing guys, and I'm going to just check-in a second to see if I have any questions on what what I what I just talked about. But one of the things you need to understand here about coconut oil is that I also don't think it's a good idea to be going out there and saying it's it's the most benign thing ever. It's it's awesome for you. It's it cured cancer. You can you can use it all the time and things like that.

Because just like any other food out there, if you consume too much of it, and if you go overboard, bad things can happen. Now, one thing about the ketogenic diet that's been going on for, you know, the past couple of years, I've been doing the ketogenic diet for about six years now, and it's helped me greatly. It's helped me to overcome my ulcerative colitis by reducing my total body chronic inflammation. It's helped me to increase my mental acuity so I could perform my duties here as an entrepreneur and work the hours that I do. It's also really really helped my energy levels.

Like I can get through my day and and not feel tired. I can go do a training session. I can go for a run. I can go have a jiu-jitsu session, and I can do all my work without feeling absolutely brain dead. But one of the mistakes I see a lot of newbies coming into the ketogenic diet making is that they consume diets that are far too high in medium chain triglycerides.

And remember, I mentioned that coconut oil is about 60% medium chain triglycerides. Well, one of the dangers of this is that if you have too many medium chain triglycerides in your blood, that could artificially raise your ketone levels. Now if you're trying to adapt into ketosis, this is a good thing. Right? It's because you want to raise your ketone levels so that your body begins to preferentially choose ketones rather than glucose, and that could really help you to get around the keto flu.

But here's the thing. If you continue to do this and you're trying to burn fat and you're trying your goal is to lose weight, your body's going to choose those ketones preferentially over doing what it shouldn't be doing, which is mobilizing your own fat stores for fuel. So at the end of the day, while I think that consuming a moderate amount of medium change triglycerides and coconut oil and and and the shorter chain fatty acids is a good thing, I think that if you're consuming nothing but coconut oil or nothing but medium change triglycerides, it could inhibit you from burning fat, and it could keep you from getting everything you need in your diet. The other thing about coconut oil is that it increases satiety, and it reduces your hunger. Now one of the things about that is that you need to have room to be able to get all the nutrients that you need.

And when it comes to fats, we really wanna make sure that we're also getting a good amount of omega three fatty acids, and that's because omega threes really help to reduce inflammation. The other thing to understand there is that docahexa docahexaetoic acid, I always mispronounce it, DHA, is very, important for brain function. Right? So up to about a third of our our dry weight of our brain is fat, and much of that is DHA. And so DHA is really important to get into the diet so that we're tending to our brains and making sure that we're keeping brain inflammation low.

You also want to make sure that you're getting enough of icopentacetoic acid, which is EPA. Alright? And and that helps with total body chronic inflammation. So you definitely want to make sure that you're you're you're getting enough omega threes in there. Now where do you get your omega threes?

Well, get those from animal sources of protein that have been grass fed. You can get them from eggs that come from free range chickens, free range organic chickens. You can get it from consuming fatty fish, and you can supplement with it. Alright? Now if you wanted to supplement with it, you could get that from a triglyceride form fish oil, or you can get that from a high EPA DHA algal oil, an oil that comes from algae.

Right? And I would only suggest getting them from those too because if you go with flax or one of the other plant sources of omega threes, it has to go through an extra extra step before it can become DHA or EPA, and you lose out on a lot a lot of it because, it's less bioavailable. So that's my take on coconut oil. I hope that that was understandable. And like I said, if you want, I've got the notes up, or I'll get the notes up there on the show notes for this episode so that you can grab them, so that you can can get get you can get all the scientific references and and really not miss a beat here.

Alright, guys. So that was a live episode of the Warrior Soul podcast, talking about coconut oil, and that was part of our Warrior Fitness q and a that we do each week here. Now the rest of the episode was pretty much me fumbling around my phone with a, just looking for questions and kinda cursing at my phone and stuff like that. So I know my podcast listeners would absolutely hate it if I posted the rest of that with all that dead noise and me just trying to fumble around my phone. So I will spare you of that at this moment.

But we do the Warrior Soul fitness q and a each week. And if you're interested in getting your questions answered, questions about nutrition, questions about fitness, questions about health, questions about anything, living your best life, head over to menshealth.warriorsoulagoge.com. That's menshealth.warriorsoulagoge.com. And when you sign up, you're gonna get a free two week workout. You're gonna do a free testosterone optimization checklist.

You're gonna do a free goal setting guide and so much more. And along with access to our private Facebook group where we put out some of the best information we can about fitness, about nutrition, about specials to do with Warrior Soul, discounts on our merch, but above all, advice for living and, advice for living your best life. So thank you guys so much for listening. I will be back at you next week and later this week with more awesome episodes from the Warrior Soul podcast. Peace.